In the manufacture of semiconductor devices, many various processing steps exist, such as etching, deposition of polysilicon and oxide materials, the application and removal of masks, and the application and removal of metal materials. Each of these different processes that occur during the fabrication of a semiconductor circuit require the use of very specialized materials that must meet very stringent standards of purity. Despite the very stringent standards of purity that are maintained during the fabrication of semiconductor circuits, there are times when contaminants are undesirably introduced, thus causing the manufacture of defective semiconductor circuits.
Once it has been determined that a lot of semiconductor circuits is defective, it is known to check whether a new batch of a recently introduced material contains contaminants that are causing the defect. With respect to wet chemical materials, this testing, as is conventionally performed, requires that a sample of the newly introduced batch of wet chemical material be delivered to an independent analysis laboratory which performs a series of analytical composition tests to identify the percentage of each different type of element in the wet chemical material.
While the above conventional test effectively indicates whether a batch of a newly introduced wet chemical material contains contaminants, this conventional test requires that a sample of the wet chemical be sent out to an independent laboratory for this analysis, and the analysis typically takes one to two days to complete. As a result, during the period of time that this test is being performed, the semiconductor processing equipment that is being used to produce the semiconductor circuits typically remains idle. This down time of at least a day or two before the problem can be discovered is undesirably long.
Accordingly, a quicker method of detecting contaminants in materials is desirable.